Sunday, June 3, 2012

For record before it disappears... JAEA (Japan Atomic Energy Agency) tries to do the "risk communication" to ordinary citizens and blows itself up on Twitter.

JAEA's Tokai Research and Development Center Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering department has created the page below, to communicate things nuclear more effectively to general public who are not familiar with special terminology and numbers. The target is women, who they say have less understanding of technical aspect of nuclear energy than men. Therefore, the key to better communication is to how to adopt women's point of view, they say.

So what have they come up with? Using a quarrel between husband and wife to illustrate what radiation, radioactivity, radioactive material mean.

If we compare radiation and radioactivity to a quarrel between husband and wife...

Angry voice of the wife is "radiation",

The excited state in which the wife is in and which causes her to shout angrily is "radioactivity",

The angry wife shouting to the husband is "radioactive material" itself.

It would be the same if the shouting party is the husband instead of the wife. But they target women, because, as they say, women are considered to have less understanding of matters related to nuclear technology.

In general, it is what has been expected in Japan for long time - that women are not good at math and science.

Even the so-called "pro-nuke" people are appalled at this clumsy "risk communication" by JAEA. "What is this? JAEA, what's the matter with you?" was the tweet from a female theoretical physicist.

The JAEA page does say it has come up with the idea by talking with 6 women who live in Hitachinaka City where the JAEA Tokai Research and Development Center is located.

26
comments:

Sometime ago a writer to this blog encouraged people working for the advertising companies to do whatever they can to stop nuclear power in Japan, and, even if they cannot quit their jobs, to do what they could to fight from within.

Maybe that is what we're seeing here. If it is intentional subversion of the JAEA campaign, then the authors of the JAEA campaign are to be credited for their creative efforts to undermine the campaign while appearing to their employers to be sincere.

If it was unintentional, well, let's hope they keep up the good work anyway. Campaigns like this will make it easier to convince the public that

NUCLEAR ENERGY, just like GENDER STEREOTYPING, are OLD IDEAS. Let's leave both in the past and move forward to an energy policy of Wind, Solar and Water, managed by Smart Grids, in a world where men and women are appreciated for their individual contributions without antiquated assumptions.

Nooooo, don't tell the truth, tell them cakes and pies and rainbows. This is more confusing than reading a paragraph explaining radioactive material/emissions.Sorry but everyone thinks japan as a whole should be wearing helmets. If only behavior reflected they didn't need to, sigh... One can dream.

I guess what it will take for some responsible behavior and awareness is over 50% of the population crawling on the street while they drag their previously internal bowels and intestines behind them before they collapse dry up like worms in the sun.

I thought the 'husband' would better suit the role of 'radiation'.That way it could be said that it is no wonder that the 'woman' is angry, clearly she has an abusive 'husband'!She should probably pack up the kids and go, while she still lives.

@laprimavera, if by "female theoretical physicist" you mean Mihoko Nojiri, she is not pro-nuke, as far as I know. She is just pro-data. She is actually working with antinuclear groups (CRMS is Fukushima, for example) to get a working Whole-Body Counter to measure internal exposure independently.

This is more evidence of the shitheads that run Japan a third rate country living in the past where women are treated like crap, .... very backward attitude by the JAEA, maybe they have been to too many hostess bars and their wives got pissed off with them.... pricks

It seems to me that they're attempting to portray women as dumb because increasing numbers of mothers are concerned about the effects of radiation. Men are usually more concerned about paying the mortgage. Wasn't this established in regards to families splitting up over attempts to evacuate? They are just trying to make people disregard womens' concerns altogether by portraying them as lacking in knowledge.

@Anon 8:33PMI may be wrong, but my understanding of Japan is that their women are not "treated like crap". I've heard of many cases where they have distinct advantages over men. It probably just seems like Japan is backwards because the old ignorant politicians are the ones making most of the decisions. Those old politicians are certainly very backwards.

In this instance, it seems to me, it's women who understand what radioactivity means; and it's men who give their best to not use their brain but rather prefer to follow the voice of their master like a dog. (And I am a man, by the way.)

Maybe some women should put their heads together and design a brochure for the government, JAEA and TEPCO-managers to explain what radioactive food, water, soil and air means for the future of their children. (The illustrations would not look as cute as in the JAEA brochure.)

And while I'm at it--bringing that woman=radioactive material comparison and the disaster debris acceptance story together: How could you call it when Kitakyushu women protest against truckloads of women from Miyagi Prefecture coming to their town? "Discrimination against Tohoku."Suddenly, what Professor Yukio Hayakawa said makes sense.

Hello, I am one of the stupid angry Japanese wives that JAEA says are not intelligent enough.

Yes, we shall learn more from men, the Japanese men. We shall follow the example of what they did with Fukushima Daiichi. We shall follow their foot steps and immediately as of this moment, we shall render our female organs and reproductive system a "cold shutdown".

There shall be no reactivation, no recriticality, no restart allowed forever. We women must maintain a complete cold shutdown of all female body functions, immediately and indefinitely... learning from the examples of JAEA men and their male friends in the government and TEPCO.

Any attempt to rekindle, restart a fire or heat with our female body shall be immediately reported to the police as a rape and sexual misconduct.

Thank you, superior men at JAEA, for giving us this wonderful idea.

PS: Ladies, get out of the rotten male chauvinist country of Japan as quickly as possible, and find a loving husband/male partner in other countries. The Japanese men are now DNA damaged.

@Anonymous 7:41 PM: What does that supposed tweet from Ms Nojiri have to do with being pro nuclear? It really seems that for some nutjobs out there, anyone not contributing to the popularization of doomsday scenarios is considered to be "pro-nuke." The most clear case is Kota Kinoshita, who is batshit insane, but there are some others around him that already sound like a cult more than anything else.

There are "cults" forming around people on both sides. Nojiri has her cults, so does Kikuchi on the side that preaches radiation is safe. Koide, Takeda, Hayakawa on the other side, with cults forming around them. Each side calling the other side nutjob. There are ardent cults around Gundersen, Alvarez, who have been attacking the admin of this blog.

Ms Nojiri has a cult? That's not the vibe I get from her tweets. She discusses sing data and rational arguments, not blocking twitter accounts of those who don't share the same opinion. Follow Kinoshita for a while and see the kind of magical thinking he is using to justify his claims (or how he tried to use Bandazhevsky instead of releasing an internet stream of one of his conferences.)

Takeda is insane, just check his article predicting the "end of Japan" based on some guy's geiger counter readings. I think people like him because his Japanese is easy to understand.

Koide just tries to scare people out of nuclear power, without realizing that each time he predicts the end of everything and nothing happens he is losing credibility. The same goes for Gundersen and Alvarez, but those are maybe just incompetent.

Hayakawa is a jerk, but seems to be rational despite being out of his depth, like when he compared the contamination maps of Chernobyl and Fukushima having no idea of how to use the data. In any case, he has been criticized by Kinoshita and the other doomsday cultists because of the tsunami rubble thing.

@Anonymous on JUNE 3, 2012 11:02 PM:Before you make a final and hasty decision, you should know it was a woman (Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska) who discovered radioactivity, it was a woman (Margaret Thatcher) who was a nuclear weapons fetishist and it was a woman (Angela Merkel, the current german canceller) who, only a few month before Fukushima happened, agreed in a (then) secret back-room deal to let Germanys ageing nuclear reactors operate for many additional years, after, in 2001, the former government had come to an agreement with the industry about a timed phase-out and the end of nuclear power in Germany.

Knowing all this, before you go into cold shutdown, maybe you could reconsider to have a partial meltdown now and then?

Have a brief look at this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2VLGrM3Fgg&feature=related

It shudders me to think, I am one of the Germans, the "iron lady" would have wiped off the map in a nuclear armageddon without hesitation, if it ever came to it.

Hands up for the "stupid angry Japanese wives that JAEA says are not intelligent enough" and thanks for such funny and brilliant comment. Ladies, you don't need to be in couple in order to be happy anyway. Women are strong enough. You are priceless, you are the precious fabric of everything, and the reign of men is at its end. Keep having faith, keep loving life. The time of change is happening now.

It does not take a deep knowledge of math or science to understand the grave dangers of nuclear radiation contamination. The effects are recorded in history for everyone to see. Women by nature are more protective of children (the future of mankind), so their voice is essential in the fight to end nuclear energy proliferation.

Also, labeling anything a 'cult' or 'conspiracy theory' is just a way for the media and others to use propaganda to confuse the people. The truth is not a 'cult' or a 'conspiracy theory'--the truth leads people to the right course of action. It has been said, the truth sets people free.

this should depict "radioactive material more exact? > http://tinyurl.com/7nnp6py-on a side note, i really enjoy reading manuals for japanese made devices because they have really neat "cartoons" about how to handle the device. even single record-able CD come with the depiction of a "sweating" CD under the sun, and scary face CD looking at a puddle of water : D

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

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